When he took the stage four years ago at the 2020 Republican national convention, Donald Trump made sure to rail against Democrats over their support for abortion rights.
“Democrat politicians refuse to protect innocent life, and then they lecture us about morality and saving America’s soul?” Trump boomed. “Tonight, we proudly declare that all children, born and unborn, have a god-given right to life.”
But this year, during his Thursday night speech at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Trump did not proudly declare anything about the “unborn”. In fact, he was conspicuously silent on the topic of abortion – as were almost all of the other speakers at the 2024 convention. Even JD Vance, Trump’s outspoken new running mate and an Ohio senator with a history supporting a national abortion ban, did not bring it up in his Wednesday speech.
The RNC’s vanishing act on abortion is a reflection of Republicans’ recent uncertainty about how, exactly, to talk about the issue. For decades, opposing the procedure was a pillar of the party. Republicans spent years attacking Roe v Wade and pushing state-level abortion restrictions, a crusade that culminated in the overturning of Roe in 2022. Trump played a pivotal role in ending the national right to abortion: he nominated three of the justices that voted for it.
But in the years since, opposition to abortion seems to have become ballot box poison. Outrage over Roe’s downfall is credited with slowing a much-promised “red wave” in the 2022 midterms. Voters in states like Ohio, Vance’s home state, and Michigan, a key battleground in the 2024 elections, have passed ballot measures to enshrine abortion rights in their states’ constitutions.
The GOP has taken notice. Many Republicans, including Vance, have started to publicly downplay their anti-abortion stances. In Arizona, a major swing state, a handful of Republicans even defected and voted in favor of repealing a near-total abortion ban. Trump, who likes to intermittently take credit for overturning Roe, has at various points suggested he would support a national abortion ban, said that states should decide and implied they should not go too far.
All this has alarmed some anti-abortion activists, who have clocked the Republican party’s retreat. A wing of the powerful anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, Students for Life Action, sent out a press release ahead of Trump’s Thursday speech that highlighted Republicans’ silence on the issue. After the anti-abortion movement spent decades amassing votes and dollars for GOP candidates, the group indicated that its members were no longer certain of their welcome at the convention.
“The GOP can and must do better,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life Action and a former Republican National Committee staffer, said in a statement. “Pro-life Americans don’t expect political leaders to have all the answers, which is why we are laying out for the GOP our framework for a new deal to ensure an end to the weaponized pro-abortion policy that has tainted the Biden-Harris record.”
Reception to the GOP’s platform has been mixed among anti-abortion activists. Hawkins praised the platform for its opposition to abortions later in pregnancy as well as its citation of the 14th amendment, which some abortion opponents believe should establish full legal rights and protections for embryos and fetuses. Such an interpretation of the 14th amendment would likely rewrite vast swathes of US law, from tax codes to traffic laws around carpool lanes.
But, for the first time in 40 years, the Republican party’s platform did not call for a national abortion ban. Instead, it suggested that states should decide their own abortion laws.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told Politico he had originally wanted to publicly fight over the platform and its lack of federal proposals on abortion. However, he abandoned those plans after Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt last weekend.
“Don’t take our silence as being indifferent to what took place,” he said. “It’s just timing.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are anything but silent on abortion. Since swing states like Arizona and Nevada are set to vote on abortion-related ballot measures in November, Democrats are hoping those measures will boost turnout among their base. Joe Biden’s campaign has also dispatched Kamala Harris on a months-long tour of the country in support of abortion rights – which may well now be Democrats’ most persuasive issue on the campaign trail.
